The Exit Interview

What follows are extracts from a much longer interview with President Clinton by Michael Paterniti on August 23, 2000.

Jan 29, 2007

Q: How has the presidency changed you?

CLINTON: I think it has made me more knowledgeable, more able, probably a little more wise. I will leave the office more idealistic about America and its possibilities than when I entered it. And because I labored from the first day I was in office, and even in the campaign, under a virtually unprecedented barrage of attack, both political and personal, it helped me to develop a certain discipline and a certain humility about--that it made me sort of get up and go to work every day no matter what else was going on. And it was hard, it didn't come easily. There were days when I was angry and days when I gave myself a pity party. But I worked through it, and it was, on occasion, almost surreal. But it also enabled me to learn all those old lessons--it's not what happens to you, it's how you react to it; no matter what people say to you, you can't define how you view the world--all those old lessons I really had to learn on a daily basis.

And so I think it helped me personally to be a better person, to be constantly judged and condemned and torn apart, then to have to confess error and be publicly humiliated and all that--it really helped me a lot, because I think that one of the greatest sins of character almost everybody is vulnerable to is pride. And I think it has really helped me to be less judgmental and less hypocritical. So I think in a funny way, even the bad parts of this, the experience, was quite good for me, and I think it will make me a better person for the rest of my life.

Q: How do you think you've changed the presidency?

CLINTON: Well, whether I changed the presidency depends upon how other people conduct it. But I think the connection of what we do in Washington to how people live is closer than it has ever been because of the way we conducted the business of government.

The White House and, in a larger sense, the nation's government matter to the American people. I think that in breaking the back of the Gingrich revolution and cutting through a lot of the meanness and antipathy toward the government per se that existed--which I think also Oklahoma City had a lot to do with, breaking the back--I think that it's much harder to, at least overtly, practice the politics of division than it was. The president is supposed to be a unifying force, not just in rhetoric but in fact.

You know, when I became president and people were saying, Well, the government is not so important anymore because the private sector is really driving the global economy, and, therefore, government will become increasingly less relevant, what I thought was that the government, to matter to people, had to be different than it was in the industrial era. That it was less important, in terms of directly creating jobs, hiring people, making sort of command-and-control decisions for the economy, but that it was even more important for the government to be--to create the conditions in which Americans can flourish in the global economy and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives.

I think that the presidency--our presidency I think was as activist as any since Roosevelt and maybe Johnson, over a broader range of areas. And so I think that people will see the presidency as a place of enormous potential.

So I think we changed the nature of presidential activism. And we proved, once again, that ideas have consequences and that it is possible, if you get a good team together and you don't worry too much about who gets the credit and everybody tries to work together, you can really get a lot done, even in an adverse political environment, even with the Congress of the other party. But you have to work at it every day in a very systematic way.

I did make a studied effort to change the way the American people felt about the government, to make it seem less distant, less alien, less tone-deaf. Depending on the issue and the year, I guess we succeeded in a greater or lesser degree. But I think on balance most folks thought I was pulling for them.

Q: Do you feel even now that you haven't finished, that there's more left to be done?

CLINTON: There has been a lot of commentary, even from some of our critics, saying what a good last year we're having, how much is getting done, both in the Congress and by executive action, and the level of activism of the administration. But I never bought that idea that part of the inherent rhythm of the presidency was to wind down in your last two years. It seems to me that the times demand a level of activism if you're conscientious. I mean, this is a very dynamic time, and my goal is to leave this country in the best possible shape, with the largest number of options available to my successor.

And then what I have to figure out is how I can be an effective citizen, an effective force for the things I believe in when I get out of here, without getting in the way of the next president. I entered the environment which was unprecedented, where the other party decided that from the moment I took my hand off the Bible, taking the oath of office, they would try to delegitimize me. And I don't want to do that, because I?don't think that's good for America. I don't think that's right.

Q: Are you worried that you will lose your leverage over your opponents when you leave office? A little bit of that played out in the election, where the Republicans wanted to make the campaign about you.

CLINTON: Well, they can't--for two reasons. One is, unlike them, I have apologized to the American people for what I did wrong, and most Americans think I paid a pretty high price. Most people make a personal mistake, they're not bankrupt or publicly humiliated and strip-searched. But everybody pays a personal price, and most Americans know that the family price is the highest price. So most people are not like politicians and pundits who only keep score in terms of whether you got hurt politically. Most people got this, and they know that I didn't get out of this for free.

That's the first thing. The second thing is, most people know that what they did was not about morality or truth or the law, it was about politics and power and didn't have anything to do with them or their welfare; it had to do with the Republicans and their welfare. And the American people have a pretty good detector about that.

And it was never very complicated. The only way that I could have been defeated is if I had played their game. It's like I tell people when Joe Lieberman was picked by Al Gore and they say, Oh, it's a big slap in the face to Clinton. I say, I don't consider it that. I agreed with what Joe Lieberman said. And I also agreed with what Joe Lieberman did when he fought against impeachment.

They never apologized to the country for impeachment, they never apologized for all the--things they've done. So what they tried to do at their convention was to have it both ways. They tried to get the people to keep beating up on me for something that the American people had put behind them. But folks, I think, know that they haven't necessarily put their abuse of power behind them. And so they have to be very careful about how they handle this, because the American people, they say, Look, that's over--this is about him and his family, and that's behind us.

And they've spent, what, $52 million on Whitewater, and what have they admitted--that there was nothing to Whitewater, nothing to the file contro-versy, nothing to the Travel Office controversy, nothing to my wife's file controversy. And not only that, some people are beginning to know that they knew all that in 1996 and they just kept it going because they couldn't let it go.

So after all this time, and they spent over $100 million on all these special prosecutors and congressional investigations, trying to make [those] the whole story of the administration, and they have yet to come up with one example of official misconduct in office--not one. And there were billions of dollars in free media time spent trying to convince people of that. How in the world the American people ever saw through it--it's a real tribute to them, that they got it.

Q: What was going through your mind before and during the 1999 State of the Union address, which you delivered in the very chamber where the House had voted for your impeachment just weeks earlier?

CLINTON: I thought in the beginning it would be sort of like the talking dog--you know, the guy can stand up and talk, and if he doesn't fall all over himself and collapse, he gets an A for effort. But I wanted to do more than that.

I felt two things. First of all, I realized that I had to just purge myself of any thought of anger at them and of any concern about what they were going to do and of any personal feelings whatever. Franklin Roosevelt once said that the president has to be America's greatest actor. That implies--that may have a pejorative implication; that's not what he meant, and that's not what I mean in this case.

But there are times when you're not permitted to have feelings, because if people get you to have feelings, if your adversaries get you to have feelings about yourself and your circumstances, then you're beat before you start. And I basically sort of convinced myself, and I still believe, that most of what happened to me politically was the cost of doing business, at the end of a twenty-year period of very increasingly negative, vitriolic politics, propagated mostly, but not entirely, by the far Right and their alliance with the Republican party.

The Republicans were trying to precipitate this great constitutional crisis for political advantage. And the American people knew things were rocking along pretty well in our country, and they didn't want their government to go away. And they certainly didn't deserve to have their president disappear or become diverted.

So when I went in there, my whole mind-set was, I'm going to stand up there and talk to America and talk to them about their jobs, what they owe America. And to be fair, I had a little bit of boost because all the surveys showed that over two thirds of the people thought the impeachment was wrong. And we had just had a stunning election in 1998, the dimensions of which still have never been fully appreciated by the political writers. That is, in the election we lost no Senate seats and gained five House seats.

So I thought that I owed it to the American people to say, Here's where we are and here's where I think we need to go and here are the specific things I'm going to do this year. That was my whole objective. And I'm very gratified that there was a positive response to it.

Q: Do you agree with those who say you used up a lot of your political capital to get through the impeachment period?

CLINTON: No. First of all, there's not a shred of evidence of it. I mean, we continued to do things to help--if there are liberal critics saying that, we continued to do things to help poor people, to help the disability community, to work for racial and ethnic reconciliation, to advance the cause of gay rights. So I just don't agree with that.

And if conservatives say that, we continued to pay the debt down, have a stronger economy, and have a very aggressive position overseas. So there's just no evidence of it. And the truth is, if anything, I gained political capital by enduring it.

I think if you look, for example, at what--in '98, at the end, the Congress supported virtually my entire education budget, and most of my other budget priorities. And the same thing happened again in '99, where we had a very, very good year.

Q: Did your approach to the job change over the years?

CLINTON: I learned things as I went along. In the first two years, we made a slew of political errors. And then we made a huge number of decisions that were good for America over the long run. But in '94, I was sort of shackled with a lot of the ragged edges of how I responded to all this incoming fire and how I had to put together a staff, figure out how it was all going to work together with the Cabinet and with the Congress, and get all this stuff done. So there was all that kind of ragged stuff.

And then we passed the economic plan by one vote. We passed the Brady Bill. We passed the assault-weapons ban, we passed NAFTA--all wildly controversial. And the benefits, none of them were apparent at the time people were voting, because the economy was already improving rapidly, but people didn't feel it yet; the crime rate was dropping, but people didn't feel it yet; the Brady Bill was beginning to work, but nobody could be absolutely sure that they weren't going to be somehow disadvantaged in their hunting or sporting or whatever. So we lost probably a dozen members of Congress that the NRA took out.

Then we had people disappointed that health care didn't pass and ambivalent about NAFTA. So we had a low turnout of our voters and an inflamed turnout of theirs. And we got our brains beat out in the '94 election, which was a terrible experience for me because I felt that--I was really confident that the economy would pick up, and I was confident that this crime policy was the right policy, and I was confident that we still had to do something about health care and we could go back to it and start chipping away at it, and by '96 people would feel it--but they didn't by '94. So that was a very discreet thing for me. And then I had to kind of rejigger my thinking and figure out how to deal with this Republican majority.

Q: Can you describe the night of the '94 election, how you went to bed that night?

CLINTON: Oh, I felt terrible because I thought all these people were taking bullets for me--not for me, they did it for America. They knew it was the right thing to do. But they wouldn't have done it if I hadn't asked them to do it--in some cases, did more than ask. [Laughter.] And they were paying a price, and I felt--I always felt that by '96, that what we were doing would become apparent if I handled the Gingrich revolution in a proper way, because I thought the country would be in good shape by then. So it was one of the darker nights of my presidency.

I felt much worse about the good people that wouldn't be serving in the Congress than I did the fact that people would be saying that I was finished and all that the next day, because I never really believed that. I thought if I handled the Gingrich majority all right, we'd be fine. I also felt they would overplay their hand, which they did, repeatedly. For three or four years, they just kept on overplaying their hand.

So there was '93 and '94 where we did a lot of the things that caused us to lose the Congress but basically ensured the success of America. I mean, the economic plan brought us back; the crime bill had a lot to do with bringing down the crime rate. And NAFTA I think was a big plus, and we had a lot of other great initiatives. We had the beginnings of the Middle East peace process with the signing of the Palestinian--Israeli accord, and then the signing of the peace treaty with Jordan. So it was a very eventful two years, very good for America, but it was contentious.

But I look back on it as a very fruitful time for America because some of the most important things I did as president were done in those first two years. And then [in] '95 and the beginning of '96 was the question of beating back the Contract on America, vetoing the budget, going through the two government shutdowns, standing our ground. And the American people essentially decided that they would stick with us. It was a huge thing. And then later we got the welfare-reform bill, which I signed only in its third incarnation. Now, they did leave in something I really hated--they cut a lot of benefits to legal immigrants, which I didn't like. But I said I'd try to get them back in, and we have now restored virtually all of them. We were able to get that done in the budget fights because the Democrats hung in there with me. And so I think it was a major achievement.

And then, of course, the '96 election turned out very well. Then '97 and '98, we had the balanced-budget agreement and a whole slew of other legislative achievements that were bipartisan achievements.

Q: Was your philosophy changing over these years?

CLINTON: No. I was learning more about how to do it and exploring what the possibilities were. I didn't have a philosophical change, but I do think one of the things that I learned in the first two years, both with the success of the economic plan and the crime bill and NAFTA, and the failure of health care, is that you can get a lot of change out of the American system, but there's only so much change you can ram through at one time. There's only so much that it can absorb. And the system could not absorb some of the things that had to be done to have a universal system with access to health care for everybody, having gone through the strain of making the tough decisions necessary to get rid of the deficit and deal with crime--because we dealt with gun safety--passing all my education-reform package, a lot of which passed in the first two years.

So we were able to go back, I think, in each of the last six years of my presidency and get quite a lot done, if you were a little bit more attuned to the rhythms of political life in the country and in the Congress.

And one of the things I hope I've changed about the presidency is that before I ran, I decided what I wanted to do. I mean, really, in pretty excruciating detail. And every year, we used the State of the Union as an organizing principle to force ourselves to decide what could we do in the best of all worlds, what do we think we've got a chance to achieve, can we pay for it, do we know how we're going to do it. So that these State of the Union addresses, every one of them--I think that we got better and better at it as we went along. And I don't mean that in a self-serving way, I mean our whole operation--we used it in a very rigorous way to plan for the future.

And so it's wonderful, because you don't have to get up every day and wonder what you're supposed to do. You've got a plan and you execute.

Q: Some presidents, including LBJ, seemed to go through serious, real depressions when they left office. Are you worried?

CLINTON: Yes, I have this recurring nightmare that for the first four or five months after I leave office, I'll be lost every time I enter a room because nobody will be playing a song. [Laughter.] I won't know where I am.

I think the answer to that is to find--and it will be different for different presidents, who are at different points in their lives. I'll be, I think, the youngest president to leave office since Theodore Roosevelt. And he lived another ten years after he got out, because he had some health problems.

President Carter has now had twenty marvelously productive years. And I think that's a pretty good model. What you have to do is find out what you care about and try to apply yourself to it, and not live just with your memories. I think about today and tomorrow, and I expect I will until my last day on earth. And I'll leave history to others. I might--I'll probably write one book or maybe two. But I'm basically, to the people and the commentators and people that write about me, I might be just as good as dead the day I leave office. But that's not the way I look at my life. I did this. I'm profoundly honored and grateful that I had a chance to do it. I did the best I could and I think the country is better off.

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